English 344: Tuesday, January 25th

I begin this post with a brief overview of my own "learning journey" thus far in the semester. I came into this term with very little background in TESOL, ESL, etc., and, a mere three weeks into the semester, I find that I am slowly beginning to understand some of the differences that I can make as a teacher when teaching ESL students versus traditional L1 students. Yet, as this blog will clarify, these three weeks have also led to many questions that do not have easy, or any, correct answer to them...

In my previous post found below that was written for English 495, I wrote about the "grammar/error correction" debate currently going on in the SLA field, and I wish to continue on with that topic again here, as items in the readings for this particular class prompted further interest in the topic for me. At one point, Saville-Troike speaks of the Error Analysis approach to SLA. While I am not going into detail on the approach here, I do want to bring up one quotation in that section that I found very interesting: "... focus on L2 learners' errors not as "bad habits" to be eradicated, but as sources of insight into the learning processes" (38). In class last week, we learned about interlanguage, that system of language of someone who is attempting to learn a new language. The error viewpoint expressed above seems to have this interlanguage in mind, as "errors provide evidence of the system of language which a learner is using at any particular point in the course of L2 development." Yet I am curious: At what point can those "errors" that may show L2 development be considered mistakes, or lapses in judgment? How can teachers tell the difference without studying the writing of students in great detail, especially when there are very likely many, many different levels of L2 development in one classroom? No simple standard for this can possibly exist.

Another point of interest in today's readings for me was where Universal Grammar and the Language Acquisition Device fit into second language acquisition. The readings in Savile-Troike question whether learners still have access to Universal Grammar when learning a second language, and I am extremely curious about this. I can only assume that age plays a huge role in this, as the Universal Grammar may evenutally fade as the years go by. Is this why, as Lightbown/Spada suggest, older learners use more problem solving abilities because they no longer have access to that innate language abililty? How does the age of the ESL student affect the lesson plans that teachers create each day? Should the potential innate ability of some students at younger ages be taken into consideration?